puffbox

Live video for Darzi’s NHS Review

This afternoon sees the effective conclusion of Lord Darzi’s year-long (ish) review of the National Health Service, under the Our NHS Our Future banner. I did a quick reskin of the associated website back in May, and we’ve gone a few steps further to mark the big finale. Inspired by comments from Tom Steinberg back in [...] read on »

Puffbox sponsors WordCamp UK

I’m proud to announce that Puffbox is sponsoring the inaugural WordCamp UK, bringing about 100 devotees of WordPress to Birmingham for a weekend of code and conversation. The event takes place on 19-20 July, at the (apparently very classy) Studio conference centre in the centre of Britain’s nominally second city. The programme covers everything from a [...] read on »

Governance of Britain relaunched

It’s a busy couple of weeks for Puffbox, with several high-profile projects all delivering within a matter of days. First to appear is a quite radical reworking of the website for the Ministry of Justice’s Governance of Britain project. The site was originally built in late 2007 as a simple news hub, gathering updates on the [...] read on »

Big things at Sky News

The new Sky News website is open for public beta viewing, and there are some significant developments. The use of actual moving video in the homepage’s ‘top stories’ carousel area is a genuine surprise, and I think it works, although there must be significant implications on the content production and technical sides. Personally, I don’t think [...] read on »

How much can a website cost?

There’s been a sudden flurry of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) landing on the Foreign Office’s doorstep in the last couple of months, on the subject of their departmental website. When it launched in late March, I noted that the purchase of the Morello content management system alone had cost them £1.47m, to some incredulity from commenters. [...] read on »

The power of postcodes

LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone has an idea. She tells Liberal Conspiracy the one IT project she’d like to see from government would be (if I can paraphrase) an email-bouncing facility, where you’d send an email (for example) to yourpostcode@police.gov.uk (sic), and it would automatically get forwarded to the relevant coppers. She rightly notes that sites [...] read on »

David Davis: now with added diversity

Just a quickie: the header graphic on the David Davis website has now been edited to show a bit of ethnic and age balance. However, data from the 2001 Census shows Haltemprice and Howden to be 98.2% white, and 24.5% over 60. On that basis, I’d probably have opted for more older faces, rather than [...] read on »

Reason to be miserable

I can’t make my mind up about the media attention drawn by Labour MP, and junior transport minister Tom Harris, for comments on his blog. Or more accurately, by the reproduction of those comments on the front of the Daily Mail. On the one hand, I’m quite pleased that the word ‘blog’ barely comes into it. [...] read on »

No10 blogging from Brussels summit

Time to unleash another Puffbox production for 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown’s off to Brussels to chat about this and that (mostly that, I guess), and as with the trip to the US in April, they’ve sent a member of the No10 web team to report on proceedings. I’ve been working with them to develop [...] read on »

Ben Hammersley prototyping at Foreign Office

Things are happening at the Foreign Office. About a month ago, they registered a new dot-com domain, with the apparent intention of hosting a series of prototype web builds. But since the only link I’ve yet seen to the domain has now been removed by its (well-connected) author, I won’t provide a link to it [...] read on »